Owned version: The Blu-ray released in 2017 by Code Red, packaged with Those Mad Mad Movie Makers (the sanitized retitle of the film better known as The Last Porno Flick).
Acquired: Late in 2017 or early in 2018 from Diabolik DVD.
Seen before?: No.
After the deep diving of the last couple pieces, it feels a bit refreshing to splash around in a puddle. Alice Goodbody is a silly Hollywood sex comedy about a sweet, naive woman sleeping her way up the ladder of fame in exchange for an ever-mounting big break in an epic about Julius Caesar. It has nothing grand to offer aside from the breathtaking body of Sharon Kelly. It is instead content to tell the same joke with slight variations - Alice finds out who she has to sleep with next while going down on "2nd assistant production manager" Myron Mittleman (that last name, I know I know), tries to accommodate the weird sexual proclivities of whomever she's been given with a modicum of success, finds her role subsequently increased and then suffers an on-set accident that puts her out of commission and demands a delay on set. This goes through five cycles, after which Scheuer hits the blackout on a hoary eye-roller of a punchline.
Much to my surprise, I found it kind of charming.
A lot of that has to do with the wide-eyed gee-shucks charm of the voluptuous Ms. Kelly, who has the difficult task of playing this material light and cheeky without letting the innate misogyny sour it or making Alice seem like too much of a dupe. She is blessedly more than up to the task, making Alice into a sunny and optimistic sort who's up for whatever because, hey, you gotta pay your dues and who wouldn't want to be in the movies? Or maybe I'm just responding to the fact that Scheuer skirts the edge of dizzy-dame stereotypes by turning Alice into a hardcore, omnivorous cinephile - if she's spacey, it's not that she's stupid but that she's lost in her head thinking about the film she just saw or looking forward to the one she's going to see later. Seriously - her first line of dialogue sees her waxing rhapsodic about Borzage's 7th Heaven, her fateful date with Mittleman sees her exclaiming, "This is exactly how June Preisser was discovered!" and one injury is met with, "I bet nothing like this ever happened to Maria Montez!" I'm just saying, I relate to being at your job and thinking about whatever you stayed up into the wee hours of the morning to watch, how could I not, I'm weak like that.
Ms. Kelly, with her open face and big easy smile, also serves as a beacon towards the script's feathery cheer. The light touch is critical in that it manages to differentiate it from the reams of contemporaneous comedies that come off as flat sitcoms, all sledgehammer jokes and dead-air timing (e.g. the film with which it shares a disc). It feints towards setting up a dichotomy between the wonder of the movies felt by Alice and the cynical sausage-grinding that actually produces those movies, but it never gets too insistent on that cynicism - it's too busy being goofy. There's a point-of-view shot from inside Alice's vagina. The director is a dime-store spoof on Erich Von Stroheim about whom is said at one point, "He thinks De Mille mighta made it if he didn't think so small!" The legendary George "Buck" Flower figures in a food-slathered sex scene that either doubles down on Tom Jones or prefigures Hot Shots!, I can't quite decide. Flower also has a bit where he spies on a neighbor of his having sex with a man in a gorilla costume. The accidents on set, as they get more elaborate and Scheuer starts to have fun with the fact that we know a crack-up is inevitable, start to seem like a lost Final Destination entry. An elephant psychiatrist boasts of having shown a frigid female elephant pornographic films. ("Of people?" "No, of elephants!") Hell, scratch that - all you need to know is that there is an elephant psychiatrist in this film. I can't defend Alice Goodbody on any real merit. I can't say it holds up over feature length. I can't even expect I'll ever watch it again. But it was a nice surprise to actually enjoy a '70s smutcom, to a degree, and that's more value than I had expected.
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